November 22, 2014

Let Your Life Speak

Issue No. 312 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting notes that acclaimed author Parker Palmer spent years imitating heroes—instead of listening to his heart. He says that if leaders “are to cast less shadows and more light, we need to ride certain monsters all the way down.” And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.

The Clearness Committee Creates Chaos

Yikes. It’s almost December—and then we’ll blink and raise a glass to the New Year, and do it all over again—expecting different results. Yikes, again.

Parker Palmer’s stunning quick-read, Let Your Life Speak, will help you think backwards and forwards. And his confession—that he failed to listen to his heart and squandered valuable years—is a warning to all of us (no matter how many candles on our last cake)…that vocation and calling matter.

He begins: • “…a funny thing happened on the way to my vocation.” • He was guided by Frederick Buechner’s inspiring insight: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

He confesses: • “I had simply found a ‘noble’ way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.”

He learned: • “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” • “My youthful understanding of ‘Let your life speak’ led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not.”

He adds: “If that sounds like what we are supposed to do with values, it is because that is what we are too often taught. There is a simplistic brand of moralism among us that wants to reduce the ethical life to making a list, checking it twice—against the index in some best-selling book of virtues, perhaps—and then trying very hard to be not naughty but nice.”

He explains the book’s subtitle, “Listening for the Voice of Vocation” with this: • “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening.” • “Vocation [rooted in the Latin for ‘voice’] does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

It’s tough to narrow down my favorites stories—I read most of them to my wife, Joanne—but certainly these two:

Favorite Story #1: The Clearness Committee. A presidential search committee for a small educational institution invited Palmer for an interview. “So as is the custom in the Quaker community, I called on half a dozen trusted friends to help me discern my vocation by means of a ‘clearness committee,’ a process in which the group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest, open questions to help discover your inner truth. (Looking back, of course, it is clear that my real intent in convening this group was not to discern anything but to brag about being offered a job I had already decided to accept!)

Gulp! One stunning question rocked his world (see pages 44-46)—and he said no to a career-enhancing opportunity.

Favorite Story #2: Outward Bound. Hanging from a cliff, 110 feet above ground in his first Outward Bound rappelling experience (more like “Outward Down”), Palmer had a profound moment (pages 82-85). Later he reflected, “I chose the weeklong course at Hurricane Island, off the coast of Maine. I should have known from that name what was in store for me; next time I will sign up for the course at Happy Gardens or Pleasant Valley!”

He describes five shadow-casting monsters: First, “insecurity about identity and worth.” Next, “the belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests.”

The third one is a real poke-in-the-ribs. “A third shadow common among leaders is ‘functional atheism,’ the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen—a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.”

The fourth shadow is fear, “especially our fear of the natural chaos of life. Many of us—parents and teachers and CEOs—are deeply devoted to eliminating all remnants of chaos from the world.”

The fifth shadow that leaders project is, “paradoxically, the denial of death itself.” He’s savvy! “Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive.” If you’re working on a strategic plan right now, you must read pages 89 to 91!

Considering our vocation “not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received,” Palmer encourages his readers that, “self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others.” Therefore, we need to become authentic leaders, who “in every setting—from families to nation-states—aim at liberating the heart, their own and others’, so that its power can liberate the world.”

To order from Amazon, click on the graphic below for Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, by Parker J. Palmer.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:1. Palmer describes the fourth shadow: “In families and churches and corporations, this shadow is projected as rigidity of rules and procedures, creating an ethos that is imprisoning rather than empowering. (Then, of course, the mess we must deal with is the prisoners trying to break out!)” So…does our culture embrace or eliminate chaos?”

2. Palmer notes, “We will become better teachers not by trying to fill the potholes in our souls but by knowing them so well that we can avoid falling into them.” Who is helping you identify your potholes—and how might that impact your “true self” vocation?

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